Western Short StoryMadame LawTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

The
body was prone in the middle of the dusty street, a late morning sun
beating down on it, flies checking their prospects, and silence
reigning over the entire town.

Not
a soul in Welby Falls had gone to check on him, their sheriff shot in
the back, his rifle on the ground beside him, and Lily Bentwell,
newest visitor in town, at the lone second floor front window of the
Black Saddle Hotel. She believed she was the only person who had seen
the shooter from a window, also on the second floor, but in the
undertaker’s place of business, Longchamp’s Last Resort for
Redemption and Paradise, which was directly across the street.

The
figure of a man, she could see, was still there behind the sheerest
drape imaginable. It made her think of the pine box due the sheriff,
perhaps the body covered with the same material so sheer that a week
in the ground would reduce it to nothing again. She hated pretense
and puffery. She hated flimsy. She hated bigotry. She hated
backstabbers and bushwhackers and men of unprincipled violence, her
father going down at the hands of what she hated most, and her
father’s weapons, agents of vengeance after endless practice,
coming as notable tools in her hands.

Leaving
her father’s town behind, the place where she had grown up, no more
ties there for her, she searched for a new location to settle down.
Hopefully she’d find a good man, fall in love, get married, have
children, and pass once more into the holy earth where her parents,
far apart, were spending all their days of eternity … unless there
was something beyond.

She
was not sure.

Welby
Falls had promised a new beginning; gorgeous scenery at the foot of
the Rockies, two streams merging nearby, the grass rich, and cattle
taking the place of thousands of buffaloes gone into history. It made
her think of hunger hitting villages on the Plains, thick steaks on
dinner plates east of the big river.

Now
Welby Falls might lose its newest visitor … it had lost its newest
sheriff, to a bushwhacker, a backstabber, from behind a sheer drapery
that promised no hiding. The killer had to be known to someone, she
thought.

But
not a soul, for nearly a half hour, had walked out to check on the
sheriff’s body.

Caught
up in one sudden thought, she strode from her room, ran down the
stairs with disdain for lobby sitters and a marked determination
shaking loose from her every step, yanked open the front door,
crossed the boardwalk, stepped into the swirling dust, and walked
with high purpose and bravery into the middle of the street.

Lily
Bentwell, a beautiful young woman of 24, no hat on her head, her hair
like a shining moon on wet coal, clad in the work pants of a cowpoke,
knelt over the body of Asa Chabley, once a sheriff like her father.
The Sharpe’s rifle, hung by his side like it was supposed to be an
extension of his body, looked out of place at the site of his death.

From
all corners off the town people watched her. Only the hotel clerk and
the owner knew who she was, and the stage driver sitting down at the
livery and getting drunk at the end of his long ride. Way back, at
the first station on his ride, the farrier exchanged the team of
horses and told him about her.

“She’s
sumpthin’,” he had said, and told him about her father’s death
and how her life had changed.

That
life was crowding her as she knelt beside the dead sheriff. A sudden
realization crowned her thinking … no matter how fast she could
run, no matter where she would go, she’d never get away from the
vengeful promise that held her together.

The
hotel clerk and the owner looked on; and the stage driver, from the
livery, looked up with the sun glaring into his eyes, yet he could
see the woman who had been a passenger on his last run of the week.

He
saw her reach for the badge on the sheriff’s chest, simply take it
off his shirt, pin it on her pale blue blouse, reach for the rifle at
the sheriff’s side, stand up and from her hip pour every round in
the weapon at the shadow behind the sheer fabric in the window on the
second floor of Longchamp’s Last Resort for Redemption and
Paradise.

Smoke
idled upward from the bore of the rifle as she stood in the middle of
Welby Falls, sunlight bouncing off the star on her blouse, fate
delivered from her hand

The
shots from Lily Bentwell had slammed through the open window. The
black-hatted man, broad in the shoulders where two rounds now found
resolution, once thick of chest where another round found solitude,
had leaned forward to return gunfire at the woman down below.
Instead, fatally impacted, he fell halfway through the window, his
torso hanging over the windowsill, and his rifle, a killer’s rifle,
fell to the boardwalk with a thud solid enough to send a rumbling
into the air.

The
killer’s death and the action of the woman in the street made the
swearing-in ceremony quite anti-climactic. Lily Bentwell had become
the new sheriff of Welby Falls without even raising her hand to say
“I do.”